Abstract
(−)-Norepinephrine is the predominant neurotransmitter of the sympathetic innervation of the heart. Racemic norepinephrine was labelled with carbon-11 and injected i.v. into Cynomolgus monkeys. Five minutes after injection there was a more than tenfold higher radioactivity in the heart than in adjacent tissue. Pretreatment with the norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor desipramine reduced the uptake by more than 80%. The high specific uptake of racemic [11C]norepinephrine indicates that enatiomerically pure (−)-[11C]norepinephrine has promising potential for detailed mapping of the sympathetic innervation of the human myocardium.
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Correspondence to: L. Farde
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Farde, L., Halldin, C., Någren, K. et al. Positron emission tomography shows high specific uptake of racemic carbon-11 labelled norepinephrine in the primate heart. Eur J Nucl Med 21, 345–347 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00947971
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00947971